Blister cards are often used to store medicaments such as prescriptions and/or over the counter drugs, vitamins, etc. Some blister cards are configured such that each blister carried by the card stores a single dose of a certain medicament. For example, some traditional cold medicines are offered in blister cards, whereby each blister contains a single dosage, e.g., one or two capsules. Such blister cards are conventionally filled and sealed using an automated process.
Other blister cards are configured as multi-dose blister cards, whereby each blister stores any number of medicaments that are to be ingested by the patient simultaneously, and at some predetermined time of day, for example. Multi-dose blister cards can simplify the ingestion of medications for patients that have been prescribed multiple drugs and/or vitamins, for example, by reducing the number of packages the patient must access to obtain the medicaments.
The process of filling and sealing multi-dose blister cards is more complicated than single-dose blister cards because each patient foreseeably requires a unique prescription medication/combination. Therefore, these multi-dose blister cards are most often filled manually by a pharmacist or a pharmaceutical technician. Once filled, the contents of the multi-dose blister card is typically verified against the patient's prescription to ensure the patient is receiving the appropriate medicaments, and then the card is sealed and delivered. This process can be tedious, time-consuming, and costly.